Originally posted by mtmckinley You can map the specular of a shader with a file to help dirty it up, or you could use layered textures/shaders.

This is fairly simple. In your material attributes, you'll see small checkerboard buttons next to each attribute. These are the mapping buttons. By mapping a file to your specular highlight, like a cloud procedural texture, for example, it gives it a "dirty" appearance.

Originally posted by mtmckinley A blue flame/thrust shouldn't be too hard to make using either particle effects or a soft-body surface with a cool flame shader.

This is a little more complicated, and might be a tough to warrant explaining in a lot of detail in a post like this... The gist of it, would be creating an emitter, perhaps using a nurbs circle, depending on what kind of look you're going for. You'll probably want to use either Cloud particles if you don't have compositing handy, or some sort of hardware particles like multi-point or multi-streak.

By adjusting the particle appearance, speed, emitter rate, etc you can make them look the way you want. You can apply a Newton field to make the points converge or expand, depending on what kind of thrust you're looking for.

Usually, with rather general questions, I give straight up answers and then answer any specific questions regarding the specific solutions that the person asking might be interested in. Much like we did here.

About Us

A little bit about who we are

People we like

Links you might find useful

Connect with

Catch up with SimplyMaya

SimplyMaya specialises in Maya tutorials. We offer over 1,000 individual Maya training videos, ranging from basic Maya tutorials through to intermediate Maya tutorials. Our tutorials are created by instructors with industry experience and are designed to get you up and running in Maya quickly without making it seem like hard work.